You Still Have Choices

It is one of the three most hopeful statements a human being can make: "But I can still make choices."

I may be unable to live any longer in my own home.  I may need help to get in and out of bed. I may have surrendered financial and medical decisions to someone else.  In larger frameworks I may have chosen to give up my choices.  But I can narrow the framework of my perception.  And then I still have choices.

Ori Brafman has a lovely little book that describes the psychology of human resilience. How is it, he and other psychologists wonder, that some folks can endure horrific circumstances and still flourish?  What characteristics do they exhibit, and how can the rest of us learn greater resilience from their examples?

One of the characteristics of the resilient, those that Brafman calls "tunnelers" (because they find a way through the obstacles in life that might inhibit the rest of us) possess is the power to live with an "internal limelight."  Tunnelers never surrender their perception of choice.  In technical terms, they maintain their sense of themselves as a "locus of control."  In terms of the psychology of hope, tunnelers maintain their sense of agency.

Other folks have an "external limelight."  Externals, Brafman writes, 

"believe that in life, as in the formation of a weather system, many different elements come together; chance plays a major role.  Just as it would be ridiculous to expect that you can influence the weather by flapping your arms to create the wind, the argument goes, it's futile to believe that you play a major role in determining your career track. According to externals, the only thing that's certain is that believing that you have significant control over life's complex events is nonsense."  Ori Brafman, Succeeding When You're Supposed to Fail, page 45.

I was struck by Brafman's description.  I have often listened as folks described how life was somehow just "happening" to them.  I have, based on my own experience, noted that feelings and responses are not like weather fronts.  They don't just happen to us as passive observers and recipients.  Life when properly lived is not a spectator sport.  We can still make choices.

That is the case even when it seems that no choices are left.  Like many pastoral care givers, I have sat with folks who should have been dead weeks or months ago.  The family was called.  Hospice services were launched.  Physicians rendered their statistical predictions. But somehow the subject of all this activity had not gotten the memo that it was time to die.

Sometimes the dying person is waiting for that last family member to get home and say good-bye. Sometimes the dying person has simply never quit at anything in her or his life.  Choosing how to live and what to do is simply etched into her or his character.  And even comatose, that character will not be altered.  Lots of things are happening to such a person.  But even to the last, we can still make choices.  It is only the framework of those choices, the size and scale of the arena that has been changed.

Brafman summarizes the work of numerous psychologists who all agree that an internal limelight is crucial to flourishing in the face of adversity.  I know that reminders of this sense of choice were critical to my own survival in the face of crushing grief.  Nothing made a larger difference to me than the simple and regular reminder that I could still choose who to respond to situations and how to manage my feelings.

This is why self-determination is so critical to mediation processes as well.  "But you still have choices," is the most hopeful and helpful thing I can say to parties in a difficult mediation.  Conflict has a way of closing off our vision of what's possible.  My most important job as a facilitator is to help people regain their capacity for seeing alternatives where it appeared that none existed.

Be hopeful, friends--you can still make choices.